Month: September 2008

I had an interesting problem this morning with the Apache forward-proxy supporting the WTSI sequencing farm.

It would be useful for the intranet service for tracking runs to know which (GA2) sequencer is requesting pages but because they’re on a dedicated subnet they have to use a forward-proxy for fetching pages (and then only from intranet services).

Now I’m very familiar using the X-Forwarded-For header and HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR environment variable (and their friends) which do something very similar for reverse-proxies but forward-proxies usually want to disguise the fact there’s an arbitrary number of clients behind them, usually with irrelevant RFC1918 private IP addresses too.

So what I want to do is slightly unusual – take the remote_addr of the client and stuff it into a different header. I could use X-Forwarded-For but it doesn’t feel right. Proxy-Via is also not right here as that’s really for the proxy servers themselves. So, I figured mod_headers on the proxy would allow me to add additional headers to the request, even though it’s forwarded on. Also following a tip I saw here using my favourite mod_rewrite and after a bit of fiddling I can up with this:

These rules sit in the container managing my proxy, after ProxyRequests and ProxyVia and before a small set of ProxyMatch restrictions.

The RewriteCond traps the contents of the REMOTE_ADDR environment variable (it’s not an HTTP header – it comes from the end of the network socket as determined by the server). The RewriteRule unconditionally copies the last RewriteCond match %1 into a new environment variable SEQ_ADDR. After this mod_headers sets the X-Sequencer request header (for the proxied request) to the value of the SEQ_ADDR environment variable.

This works very nicely though I’d have hoped a more elegant solution would be this:

RequestHeader set X-Sequencer %{REMOTE_ADDR}

but this doesn’t seem to work and I’m not sure why. Anyway, by comparing $ENV{HTTP_X_SEQUENCER} to a shared lookup table, the sequencing apps running on the intranet can now track which sequencer is making requests. Yay!